From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Anthony Sorace Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v1257) Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="Apple-Mail=_9E96CB61-B24E-4180-A4FD-51C9E2FAFB71"; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; micalg=pgp-sha1 Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:50:54 -0400 In-Reply-To: To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> References: <20120316193646.GA2789@polynum.com> Message-Id: Subject: [9fans] Summer of Plan 9 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6b736b3a-ead7-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 --Apple-Mail=_9E96CB61-B24E-4180-A4FD-51C9E2FAFB71 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Reparenting. > So this all makes me wonder why some social aggregation group > (aka stack overflow or reddit/programming) or even just a big group > of decentralized nerds couldn't just do a variant of GSoC on our own. This is entirely possible. Other organizations who've previously been involved in GSoC have done this - KDE being the most notable example. Google provides some useful tools and examples from their own experience with GSoC that would be helpful (for our community, maybe more the knowledge than the tools, but who knows), and I'm certain some of the Google, KDE, or other similar folks would be willing to talk to us about how to get such a thing off the ground. Yes, there is money involved. =46rom memory, students get $500 when they're accepted, $2,250 if they pass midterm evaluation, and another $2,250 if they pass final evaluation. It's a decent (if unimpressive) stipend for a sumer internship. Google's motto for the payments has become "flip bits, not burgers". It's not about competing for top talent on price, but rather allowing students who'd really like to be coding for the summer to do so without worrying about where their food (beer?) money will come from. We do have some money sitting with Software for the Public Interest (SPI) with our name on it from our previous participation with GSoC, but probably only enough to sponsor 1.5 students at GSoC-ish rates. SPI's also changed either their requirements or their enforcement of them since we got that money in (part of why we don't have more in there) which might make getting it out a bit tricky, but I'm sure it's possible. I'll start figuring out how we can make that happen (which we should know anyway). My main concern is that to put on some kind of formal program, we'd need a certain critical mass to make it worthwhile. I think it'd be a bit silly to do this as a program (rather than just hiring a student = for a summer) if we couldn't host, say, a half-dozen students, at least. Unfortunately, that's more than the total number of even half-way respectable applications we got last year. Now, we had a few folks commit to helping out with PR for this year's GSoC effort, had we been admitted, so I imagine we would've done better this year. I think if we can't get this level of participation lined up, with = funding to back it, we're not really talking about a Sumer of Code style program, and are really talking about some sort of organized "bounty" system (where, say, Kickstarter might be a better fit). That's okay, although their success is more spotty than GSoC's. So that brings me to my two main questions for a hypothetical Summer of Plan 9: 1) Participation Do folks believe (based on knowledge of actual students, not just "of course Plan 9 is awesome!") that we could get some promising students interested in participating in such a program for the summer? Understanding that it'd have less resum=E9 value than a Google-back project and the selection of projects is inherently a bit more limited. Assume we could pay roughly comparably to GSoC. I'm mostly interested in hearing from folks with direct academic connections or other exposure to actual candidates here. 2) Funding Assume we'd look to fund 6 students at $5,000 each, and we can get $6,000 from SPI. That puts us $24,000 short. Any good ideas for where that'd come from? Anyone with good lines to a prospective corporate backer? Keep in mind we don't currently have a formal entity to handle the money (non-profit or otherwise), which might put off some potential backers. Folks may want to contact me off-list; I'll keep things (other than a running total of potential funds) confidential until we're ready to commit. We have great mentors. I'd (humbly!) suggest that between Devon and I we've got most of the org admin stuff pretty well down. Having fired my main paying client, I've got some free time for interesting tech work, and would gladly put that into getting all the infrastructure working. If we can address the above two points by, say, the end of March or very early April, I think we can make a run of it. Anthony= --Apple-Mail=_9E96CB61-B24E-4180-A4FD-51C9E2FAFB71 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=signature.asc Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.17 (Darwin) iEYEARECAAYFAk9nVeQACgkQyrb52b5lrs5raACaA9niqXmVgPfm7EdopTF1rLj5 7QcAnjE7TZp2UJuOf0uUM920T7MxQbGJ =BWLk -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --Apple-Mail=_9E96CB61-B24E-4180-A4FD-51C9E2FAFB71--